5 Things to Talk About This Weekend

You know you’ve made it when Sesame Street parodies you.

1. Game of Thrones returns, Internet goes crazyEveryone’s favorite murder-happy fantasy series returns for its fifth season this Sunday, and every meme-maker out there got suitably pumped for all the forthcoming stabbings and dragon burnings. Among the best videos: Seth Meyers bringing Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) to a Brooklyn dinner party on Late Night; Key and Peele‘s excitable valets acting out all of the series’ most epic deaths; and Grover and the Sesame Street gang playing the significantly lower-stakes “game of chairs.”

2. NASA scientist says we’ll discover alien life by 2025It’s pretty much a given that we’re not alone in this universe—but finding our fellow intelligent lifeforms out in all that inky blackness is another matter altogether. Still, NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan is optimistic: At a panel discussion this week, she predicted that humans will find evidence of extraterrestrial life within the next two or three decades. Let’s just hope we find them before…they find us. *Cue Will Smith strutting ominously in a flight suit* [Discovery]

3. Bobcat fights shark in real lifeOnly in Florida. While walking along Vero Beach on Monday, Floridian John Bailey saw a wild bobcat pawing at the surf. The next thing he knew, the maniac had dragged a small live shark out with him. Bailey managed to capture the moment with his iPhone camera before the cat ditched his catch and high-tailed it to the woods. Most likely because men were never meant to witness the mythic, eternal battle between bobcats and sharks that has raged down the centuries. [National Geographic]

4. Photography shoots celebrity tintypes at SundanceMost photographers do everything they can to smooth out the wrinkles and quirks of Hollywood types, but Victoria Will went in the opposite direction. While at the Sundance Film Festival, she captured shots of stars like Bob Odenkirk, Kevin Bacon, Lisa Kudrow and more using a tricky 19th-century photography style. The resulting portraits, printed on aluminum plates, are as dramatic as they are revealing. Who’d have thought Jason Segel could look so intimidating? [Demilked]

5. Cat survives behind wall for five yearsIt sounds like a dark fable, but this is the real thing: In a Cairo train station, a cat named Biso got itself stuck in a cavity behind a wall in 2010. Previous rescue attempts have failed, but the cat was kept alive by an old man dubbed Uncle Abdo, who fed Biso through a chink in the wall. Amazingly, the feline made it out in one piece this week thanks to the intervention of animal-rights activists. Talk about nine lives. [Metro]